If I built a distro I'd call it Buddha Linux so every time someone points out something good in general Linux discourse I could say "that's exactly how Buddha Linux is" and every time someone points out something bad I'd say "that's exactly how Buddha Linux is". It's infinite marketing. It's the absence of marketing.

I like the ability, I dislike the obligations to customize things to get stuff to work.

Maybe not exactly the same, but Bodhi Linux is an Ubuntu derivative that develops the Moksha desktop environment based on the Enlightenment window manager.

You have the ability to break anything. Your distro, maintainers, developers also like to break things from time to time.

Don’t blame yourself for others breaking things.

That's why I'm making exactly 0 (Zero) modifications to my Mint install. Win win!

It's a gift and a curse

Post title (on Lemmy, mind you) inspired by using the nuclear option in the game Lemmings?

That's exactly how Buddha Linux is.

Me, cursing at my lack of sound:
"Maybe I shouldn't mess with my audio server config..."

Me, finally having fixed it:
"I'll fucking do it again"

Unintentional, but that's funny. I think I played a Lemmings demo sometime back in the 90s, but not enough to remember any specifics.

Like having to debloat windows before it's usable.

lmao for real. i've been so tempted to just get a system76 and be done with all that. randomly losing audio in the middle of doing anything is so obnoxious.

I haven't had any issues with it since the last time fixing it. There's a single app (Steam) that forgets its audio settings on reboot and every update replaces the launch script I use to help it remember, but even so, it runs perfectly well.

It's just that every time I do decide to mess with it, I end up with a silent reminder that I have no idea what I'm doing. Then I tinker some more and it starts working again and stays stable so apparently it's correct now and I'm not sure I understand why. So I decide to leave it be, until the urge to try something new becomes overwhelming...

"Never touch a running system" is for cowards. And reasonable people, I guess. I suppose I'm neither.

I used to make a game out of seeing how much of the map I could destroy by nuking my lemmings.

Responsbility's double edged sword

This is kinda why Bazzite is the only distro I can recomment to my gaming friends. The default settings work well, and its very hard to break it because its pretty locked down and it pushes users to use flatpaks via the app store, which generally work great. It also does its own updates in the background (with a backup just in case!) so nobody ever really has to worry about it, and I really appreciate it for that.

I copy paste whatever the documentation tells me to do. Somebody wrote it for a reason.

For a millenial Windows user, Arch and now Cachy of all distros are now on par with how win98, WinXP and Seven worked on personal PCs in the 00s. I baselessly assume that a lot of people of my generation, who fought with the blocky interface of these, would feel more at home there than on Win10/11.

Vibe coding nixos to combine kde and gnome on an ext2 raid with snapshots

My man walked right into the trap while watching you build it

The biggest issue I've seen is knowing how to properly permission flatpaks, sometimes it doesn't include default values that actually work and flatseal helps but I'm a techy guy and even I was bewildered looking at all the options the first several times.

Or like having to login to a microslop account to use offline tools

It's not about knowing what stuff to touch, it's about knowing what not to touch. -Buddha Linux

Change "ability" to "necessity"

The con is more like:

You must configure something you never wanted to know anything about, but I guess today is a learning day...again...

Linux is really about the changes you don't make

This is unironically why I switched over to Bazzite, and why I recommend it to newbies as well.

I will tinker too much and break things.

At least with Bazzite, if I thinker too much in a container, I just throw out the container and try again.

(And if you insist on fucking up the core OS, presuming at least some of it is still intact, you can rollback/reinstall/rebase fairly easily)

There is no trap. Only a pause on your path.

Bazzite was too limiting for me and the layered updates made updating take forever. I was only using it on a media PC at the time too, so it wasn't as if I had that many changes.

I'm perfectly happy with CachyOS. Can basically do whatever I want and snapshots are a nice safety net. Updates take like 2-5 minutes depending on how long it's been since the last time I ran updates and the power of the system (Steamdeck always takes longer than my desktop or media PC).

Installed Bazzite once. Lasted about two weeks, before this hard-to-break-distro broke on it's own.

Never did anything to it, it just started acting up.

Switched to CachyOS and it just works.

Except on Linux Mint, where it asks if I want the usual, and I click "Yes."

That's a good data point I'll keep in mind. Unfortunately cachy does not do nearly as much for the user out of the box so I can't really recommend it to those friends, but it's a great distro.

Edit: can I ask what hardware you were running?

Running on Dell XPS, Lenovo T-Series and Asus laptops absolutely 0 problems with audio... except Slack.

Boss: let's huddle

Me: OK! preferences > audio and video, webcam works, mic showing me talking!!!! Join Huddle!

Boss: I can't hear you.

Me: preferences > audio and video , microphone no longer exists.

pkill slack

slack &

restart huddle, it's fine.

But, to be fair, he's on windows and 1/10 times he can't be heard.

Hey I mean, if Cachy works for you, that's awesome!

I've not tried it yet myself, but I'm not gonna be like an insane hyper fan boy for Bazzite.

I will fully admit to just having had toooo many insane experiences trying to get Arch to do what I wanna do... kinda sucks to have to rely on the AUR for random dependencies for something like building a whole game engine from source.

But, my use case is not your use case, I'm geneuinely glad you're happy with what works for you.

The whole point of inmutabiltiy is that, even if the system breaks itself on update, you just rollback to a working image. I've had issues with bazzite, but never once have I lost a system with it.

Weirdly I love this about Linux but fucking hate it about android. Providing PC support to a newbie Linux user is a joy. It’s a fun learning experience. With Android it’s a junkie trying to get their fix and need you to unfuck their Skinner box.

I guess the point is that automatic updates ruin stuff way more unexpectedly, than knowing that it broke because I pressed the update button.

Before knowing it was the update I tried fixing it unsuccessfully and I could've saved some time and nerves.

An old PC. Some ASUS motherboard from before 2010, Intel CPU and an Nvidia GTX 1650

According to some distros, source is reality. According to other distros, binary is reality. But the truth is in the middle way: binary and source are the same.

Compiling is just a construct! I could use Gentoo or flatpak and get the same product.

I have had to learn about random things to fix problems on Windows computers far more often than with Linux computers, or even just to get them to behave the way I want.

It's usually a lot faster and more permanent on Linux, though. And I get to learn about an open technology rather than a closed product.

That's fair. And I generally agree with you. I've installed a lot of different distros at this point, and I ultimately enjoyed installing and maintaining Gentoo, which is the distro I ended up with after years of using Artix. So it's not like I don't like learning new things and customizing an installation from the ground up.

My original comment was just pointing out that it's not always a fun or positive experience to learn something new about Linux because something broke or you missed or misunderstood some part of the documentation.

For me, 99% of the time, I'm down to learn something new about computers. Heck I'm getting a CS degree right now, I better! But I'd be daft to think that's the mindset of most people, and even I have my limits.

One of the goals of Cachy is to take the pain out of Arch. I'd tried to use various Arch flavors before and I just never had a good experience. Vanilla I had no patience for, Manjaro is known to break more than vanilla with updates (something that happened to me), and Endevor just didn't feel right for some reason.

Arch purists aren't happy about that because it goes against the "ethos" of arch, but they don't seem to like when a distro comes with a desktop environment.

Cachy has been pretty painless and I've been running it on multiple machines. There are regressions that sometimes happen since it's still arch and gets the latest updates, but that stuff is usually quickly fixed or rolled back if there is a bigger issue that needs more time to fix.

The only real issue I had was it revealed a hardware problem with the newer Ryzen CPUs getting unstable in the new lower power CState 6 when idle. Disabling the CState fixed the issue.

That's because android doesn't let you do what you want. It treats the user like an idiot. Too many checks and "security" measures that boil down to "we don't trust you, and you shouldn't trust yourself, so we're making this harder.